New Twitter Feature - Image Storage

Twitter will launch its own photo sharing feature very soon, according to a purported scoop by Alexia Tsotsis today at TechCrunch. After years of struggles to stay online and apparently giving up any hope of retrieving archival messages in text for its users, a move into photo hosting and sharing would be another show of confidence by Twitter in its newfound architectural stability.

But would you trust Twitter to host your photos? Twitter, the network for fleeting thoughts, in short form? The service that has let so much history pass through its fingers with so little agony voiced over its barely accessible archives and shallow search? I don't know if I, or others, will trust Twitter to host photos. I want mine cross-posted to Flickr, just for safety's sake. I asked, on Twitter, if other people would trust Twitter with their photos and got a resounding No. Tweets are Tweets, but photos are something special.

It's unclear exactly when such a feature could launch, Tsotsis reported that it could happen within days but noted with a Crunchlike grin of self-satisfaction that "naturally this post might change that." Maybe.

Many developers have expected Twitter to do something like this for a long time, though, and it makes a lot of sense for the company to enrich its offering by building photo sharing in-house. Twitter has said over and over that developers shouldn't build apps that mirror what an official Twitter client does or even might do. They are the media company, their ecosystem participants are now the analytics providers on top of the media - not the media themselves.

Facebook, of course, has a long and illustrious history of success with photo sharing and archiving. Facebook was a network built on trust, security and privacy though - until its talons were sunk deep enough that it could do a 180 on privacy without anyone feeling capable of leaving any longer.

Twitter is different. It's public, wide open, temporal, poorly archived.

Those days may be past, though. Twitter's staff is much larger and stronger than it was in the early days and its struggles with archives may be more a result of historical architecture than the company's current state. The company added a feature back in last week, for example, that it had removed two years ago because it was computationally expensive.

Would you, could you, should you trust Twitter to save your precious little moments in pictures? We're likely to find out very soon.

URL Design

You should take time to design your URL structure. If there’s one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it’s to take time to design your URL structure. Don’t leave it up to your framework. Don’t leave it up to chance. Think about it and craft an experience.

URL Design is a complex subject. I can’t say there are any “right” solutions — it’s much like the rest of design. There’s good URL design, there’s bad URL design, and there’s everything in between — it’s subjective.

7 Tips To Keep Visitors On Your Website Longer

Here are 7 tips to keep those visitors around:

    Make Sure You Are Relevant If you are targeting a certain keyword and using it in your title and meta tags make sure your webpage is exactly what a search engine visitor is looking for. It doesn’t matter if you rank #1 in Google for the term “car insurance” if when someone gets to your site all they find are pictures of scooters. People will bounce from your site like it’s a rubber wall if they can’t find relevant information on it. This is why you should only target one keyword per page or blog post.

How To Choose Someone To Do Your SEO

Since most businesses have gone online, most are in need of publicizing their online businesses. In addition, the SEO’s have proved to be of great help to most online entrepreneurs and online businessmen. Some of these uses will vary from one reason to another of using the SEO but the major reason for using the SEO is so as to increase web traffic. There are steps on how to use the Search Engine optimizers.

    The main purpose of a SEO is to give your website a high placement in the search engine results. For instance in case you need to advertise on the latest modems for the Internet all you need is to ensure that the keyword (products name) is a part of your website content and this will make it easier for interested parties, trace your product easily.

Why did LOL infiltrate the language?

The internet slang term "LOL" (laughing out loud) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the mild dismay of language purists. But where did the term originate? And is it really a threat to our lexicon?

"OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!"

If you find the above string of letters utterly unintelligible, you are clearly an internet "noob". Let me start again.

The Battle for "Location," This Time with Real Armies

Although many of us have come to rely on Google Maps for navigation, the service is by no means the official arbiter of territory or borders. Nevertheless, twice within as many weeks, Google has found itself in the middle of geopolitical conflicts due to errors in its mapping service.

Last week, a Nicaraguan military commander using Google Maps, moved his troops into an area near the Costa Rica border that, come to find out, was actually - oops - in Costa Rica. The troops reportedly took down the Costa Rican flag and raised the Nicaraguan flag, which whether inadvertent or not, certainly made the incursion look a lot like a hostile act. The area was already disputed between the two countries, and according to the AP, a discussion with US State Department officials led Google to conclude that "there was indeed an error in the compilation of the source data, by up to 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles)."

4 Reasons You Should Add Photos or Illustrations to Every Blog Post

Startup Priorities: Is Design More Important Than Engineering?

We are all told to never judge a book by its cover, but let's face it, when we find ourselves at an ugly website, we automatically make assumptions about the quality of the services that site provides.

According to Silicon Valley angel investor Dave McClure, design needs to be one of the top priorities for Internet startups, not an afterthought. These days, as McClure explains in a recent BusinessWeek.com article, the technical expertise it takes to engineer a basic back-end framework is at a much more accessible level than it was in years past, which means payroll dollars can be better spent on masterful designers.

Gmail Updated for the iPad

The latest in the wave of special iPad versions of your favorite apps? Gmail. Built on the year-old HTML5 Gmail web app for the iPhone, the Gmail for iPad sports a double column display and looks great with whole threads unfurled. "Tablets like the iPad give us even more room to innovate," the Gmail team said today.